Rockford needs to watch Whole Foods enter a food desert

Friday

Sep 6, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 6, 2013 at 5:15 AM

The high-end natural foods grocer will operate an 18,000-square-foot store in one of Chicago's toughest and poorest neighborhoods.

Brian Leaf

Food deserts, areas of cities (think Rockford's west side) where there are few or no places to buy groceries, are usually in the poorest, toughest neighborhoods, the kinds of places corporate grocers don't like to invest in.

So it will be interesting to watch how Whole Foods, the high-end natural and organic foods retailer, fares in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood where it plans to open an 18,000-square-foot store in 2016. According to The Atlantic Cities:

"In the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, 42 percent of households currently live below the federal poverty line. The unemployment rate of 21 percent is almost twice the city's average."

Whole Foods isn't going into Englewood alone. The City of Chicago will chip in $10 million in infrastructure costs for Whole Foods, which according to the Sun Times must convince a skeptical neighborhood that it can "serve their needs at affordable prices."

There are no Whole Foods stores in the Rockford market so there's little likelihood of the chain targeting our food deserts. But if Whole Foods experiment in Chicago (it's also opening in a Detroit neighborhood that is gentrifying) could it help cities like Rockford convince grocers that they can succeed in neighborhoods they now avoid?